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Fight in Los Angeles Over an N.F.L. Team That Doesn’t Exist Yet

CITY OF INDUSTRY, Calif. — Los Angeles has not had an N.F.L. team since the Raiders and the Rams left town 16 years ago. But now it may have the next best thing: a bruising fight over how to reclaim the game.

Two high-profile sports moguls, once partners in building the downtown Staples Center, have become rivals in an increasingly acrid battle over where to build a stadium in Los Angeles. One is pushing a 78,000-seat stadium here in City of Industry, a business and warehouse district with fewer than 1,000 residents about 30 miles east of the heart of Hollywood, while the other is arguing for a 65,000-seat stadium shoehorned into a corner of downtown Los Angeles.

So far the fight has mostly served as just an embarrassing reminder that Los Angeles County, the second-largest media market in the nation and home to 9.8 million people and almost every diversion known to man, does not have a single National Football League team. Even Green Bay, Wis., with a population of 101,412, has the Packers.

“It’s ridiculous that we don’t have a team; it’s a huge market here,” said Nick Schwarz, 20, who lives in the Woodland Hills neighborhood and started a Facebook group dedicated to bringing football back. “I’ve always been a football fan, but I wasn’t old enough to remember when the Rams and the Raiders were here.”

Wendy Greuel, the city comptroller, who was born in Los Angeles, said: “In my life, I’ve had two football teams. My sons have had nothing.”

Photo

A rendering of an $800 million stadium that the Majestic Realty Company is proposing to build east of Los Angeles.Credit
Meis Architects.

The competing teams to build a new stadium are the Majestic Realty Company, which has proposed an $800 million stadium on 600 acres of rolling hills here with views of snow-capped mountains, and the Anschutz Entertainment Group, or A.E.G., which has countered with a $1.2 billion downtown stadium with a retractable dome, part of a renovated Los Angeles Convention Center that would be used for concerts, conventions and other sports events.

John H. Semcken III, a vice president of Majestic, said the A.E.G. plan would come with traffic jams and exorbitant parking fees and would cost taxpayers millions of dollars. And forget about tailgating, he said.

“What’s the reaction going to be from a fan if some guy is waving them into a parking lot and says, ‘O.K., that’s $50 to park, sir’?” Mr. Semcken said. “To get from downtown to our site — 25 miles — is faster than it’s going to take to get the three blocks from the highway exit to the convention center.”

Timothy J. Leiweke, the president of A.E.G., dismissed the criticisms, saying downtown Los Angeles had shown it could handle the traffic of big events.

“They lie,” Mr. Leiweke said. “They want to get into a war of words. They want to get into a smear campaign, and we’re not going to do it. Only desperate people say desperate things. The fact is that we will pay 100 percent of whatever the stadium costs.”

“If ultimately they were so convinced that their site was the right site,” Mr. Leiweke said, “they would have had a team there and they would have built it, and they would spend less time throwing rocks at our site.”

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Rendering of a $1.2 billion downtown stadium proposed by A.E.G.Credit
Courtesy OF AEG

(Mr. Semcken called Mr. Leiweke a “bad man” in a recent interview with The Orange County Register. He subsequently called Mr. Leiweke to apologize at the behest of Edward P. Roski Jr., the chief executive of Majestic, who had been Mr. Leiweke’s partner in building the Staples Center, people close to both men said.)

Mr. Roski and the owner of A.E.G., Philip Anschutz, were partners in developing the Staples Center, a sports and entertainment site, and are co-owners of the Los Angeles Kings of the National Hockey League.

But while Mr. Roski helped bring basketball and hockey to downtown Los Angeles, he has made clear his skepticism about a football stadium in the crowded urban center.

Mr. Anschutz, meanwhile, has remained mostly quiet, at least publicly, on the subject of the downtown football stadium, letting his longtime deputy, Mr. Leiweke, lead the campaign and carry the argument.

“I have great respect for Ed Roski,” Mr. Leiweke said when asked about the split between the developers. “I do feel bad that Ed has put in this much time and energy on this particular vision.”

The intensity of the fight reflects an increasing sense that what has long seemed something of a pipe dream might actually happen.

Photo

Timothy J. Leiweke, left, and Edward P. Roski Jr. teamed up for the Staples Center but are now rivals on stadium proposals.Credit
Phil McCarten/Reuters; Business Wire

“The sun, the moon and the stars seem to be aligning,” said Austin Beutner, the Los Angeles first deputy mayor in charge of business development. “Both sides seem real serious about this.”

Eric P. Grubman, executive vice president of the N.F.L., said the league could not begin to negotiate a possible move for a team until it reached a new labor contract with players; the current one expires at the end of this season. Still, he suggested that the N.F.L. was intrigued by both proposals.

“Our assessment is that both projects are more tangible than any other similar initiatives of the past five years,” Mr. Grubman said.

No teams have committed to either plan, but a number have expressed their unhappiness with their current stadiums, including the Jacksonville Jaguars, the Minnesota Vikings, the Oakland Raiders and the San Diego Chargers.

Both companies say the stadiums would be privately financed. Mr. Leiweke said he was undertaking a big effort to sell naming rights, which he added would be critical to making the project work financially.

This is the latest in what has been a procession of stadium proposals since 1994, including redeveloping the Los Angeles Memorial Coliseum and building a football arena next to Dodger Stadium.

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The Staples Center in 1999.Credit
Reed Saxon/Associated Press

For all the soap-opera elements to this battle, it has also raised anew questions about the true appetite of this region for a professional football team.

The Rams and the Raiders left in part because they were suffering with outdated stadiums, but also because of anemic attendance. After all, there are a lot of things to do on any Sunday afternoon in the winter in Los Angeles.

Some people are also convinced that the N.F.L. does not really want to put a football team in Los Angeles. Until now, the threat of Los Angeles has been a tool to persuade other communities to subsidize football stadiums. Officials here have made it clear that they would not agree to any plan that would need a public subsidy.

Both proposals bring measures of inconvenience for fans. The downtown stadium would be tucked into an already crowded corner of the city. And the site here is hardly a breeze of a drive from where many people in Los Angeles live.

“It would be a major concern for us, how far east it is,” said Mike Lurey, 64, a retired lawyer who lives in Pacific Palisades in the western part of the city.

For all the potential complications, A.E.G. officials said they were pushing to win approvals from Los Angeles and the N.F.L.

“We don’t want to drag this on forever,” said Casey Wasserman, a partner in the A.E.G. deal.

Ian Lovett contributed reporting from Los Angeles.

A version of this article appears in print on January 9, 2011, on page A12 of the New York edition with the headline: Fight in Los Angeles Over an N.F.L. Team That Doesn’t Exist Yet. Order Reprints|Today's Paper|Subscribe